Haiti is a strange country…

The Haitians used to tell me, “One day you see them, the next day they are gone.” Tuesday, our missionary, Kaeli, had gone to Old Letant with a young visiting girl, Haley Ostrander, age 12. She is pictured on the boat with all of the Haitian children. They had been giving out candy to the kids.

Yesterday, Wednesday, we made the trip back to Old Letant because Kaeli had run out of candy the day before, and we wanted to find a place to set up a Mobile Medical Clinic there. A Haitian father began to tell me that his granddaughter, age 3, Lourdie Gustave, had died the night before. We couldn’t believe it! She is one of the little girls sitting on the boat with Haley. The mother of the child was so distraught that she was violently shaking and mentally incoherent. The father of the three-year-old lay on the ground covered in dirt, sobbing, and in agony… his entire body covered in dirt, as well as his face… (pictured) what a mystery. What had happened to her?

We went to the hut and saw that they had “boarded the door to the grass hut shut with nails.” Grandpa opened it. Kaeli and I went inside, and on the floor of the hut was the beautiful little Haitian girl, wrapped in a sheet, dead! We couldn’t believe it! They said she “passed out” in her sleep and just died! We gave the family some money to bury her… her father said they were going to take her to a distant village (by tap-tap) and bury her in the village of her ancestors. We were in shock! She had not been sick.

If anyone has any ideas of what could have happened to her, besides Voodoo, I’d like to know. She was in our Love A Child School in Old Letant… “One day you see them, the next day they are gone.” Sherry